Bribery

A rewards chart uses small prizes to give kids a little shove towards better behavior – brushing their teeth, for example. When tooth-brushing becomes automatic, you no longer have to reward them, and you can work on other behavior you’d like to reinforce.

Beatings

No, no, we’re not saying you should beat your children. Allow them to beat on YOU.

If you’re up for it, and your kids are small enough, let your kids wrestle you. Have them try to hold you down to the floor as you try to get up. Smack each other with pillows. Let them hang from your outstretched arms. A study showed that fathers roughhousing with children is crucial to their development, and another expert said roughhousing with moms benefits kids, too.

Most kids love trying to wrestle their parents into submission. Or fake-punch them or fake-drown them.

Kids love to play rough with their parents and it’s great exercise — for the parents, too.

Video games

Seems counterintuitive, right? But there’s tons of games that let kids get their sweat on. One study looked at active video games like Wii Sports bowling, Just Dance, Wii Fit, Kinect Sports and Dance Dance Revolution. They concluded they are a good alternative to sitting around.

AND their health benefits are comparable to “field-based physical activity.”

For everyone who uses our bookmarked routes feature, there’s some good news! We’ve recently released changes that will allow you to sort or filter the list of routes you’ve saved through gmap-pedometer.com. And we made things better for mobile use too.

Sorting

You can now sort the list of bookmarks by any field (distance, name, description, date, even the elevation fields.) It works a little differently on desktop than it does on mobile: for desktop users click the column heading, for mobile tap the name of the field the data is currently sorted by. Watch the videos below to see it in action.

Filtering

We’ve also added the ability to filter on any field. If you want to see all your five-mile routes, just start typing “5.” and all fields that don’t match that will disappear. It works across all fields at once, so you can filter on name just as easily as date or distance. It’s also shown in the videos.

Mobile

And we build an entire separate UI for mobile users for the bookmark list. We hope you agree it’ll make the list much easier to read on a tiny screen.

These features are available for any user who creates an account and uses the bookmarked route feature. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for? It’s free and you get a nifty workout logger too! Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

Who’d you rather be: the guy with the parasol or the guy in the ambulance?

Hello, beloved users of Gmaps Pedometer.

Hope Iron Man hydrated

We have to admit something to you. Not everyone on our team suffered through winter. In fact, one of us spent the months of November through February perfecting the art of floating around on a pool raft.

I confess: That’s me, and I live in Bangkok.

All that floating and daydreaming ate away at my workout mojo, though. Now that it’s insanely hot and humid here, it’s even harder to make myself run outdoors. So I did what anyone would do: Signed up for a race.

My husband and I managed to complete this 3K in about 21 minutes and were delighted we didn’t collapse. The temperature at the 6 a.m. starting time was 81 degrees, and the humidity was 65 percent.

We were two of the only Westerners there, but even the locals were suffering from the heat, especially the brave souls who ran the 12.8K. So that got me wondering: How do the die-hards who run here make it?

The family that runs in costume together stays together.

I turned to the Facebook page of Bangkok Runners, a group of craaazy and awesome people who run here all the time. Someone asked this very question recently, and they had a ton of great responses.

Here’s some of their tips for training in the Land of Smiles.

Pre-run fried noodles = bad. Post-run = excellent.

Avoid the midday heat. Train at dawn or dusk.

Hydrate from the moment you wake up.

Jump into the shower fully clothed before you head out.

Carry a frozen bottle of water. Keeping your hands cool helps.

Take breaks every 2 km or so. Grab drinks at convenience stores. Nip into park bathrooms and splash water on your head.

Bring a hydration pack for longer sessions.

Avoid rice and fried food. Eat fruit and drink coconut water.

Get used to the heat. Train in it as much as you can stand. Keep your air conditioninglow.

First of all, we run this website. Second of all, we do everything else: Work at our day jobs, raise children, shop for groceries and celebrate anniversaries. So, like you, we’ve had to get pretty creative over the years about ways to squeeze in our training.

This has led to some strange scheduling, with workouts happening after children are asleep or in the nasty predawn hours before a commute. But you gotta do what you gotta do, right? Body isn’t gonna train itself. We know you’ve all been there, staring down a marathon date or competing with an office buddy over who can lose the most weight.

So we’ve decided to share with you some of our favorite items of gear. The stuff that’s there for us when we blearily reach for it on a 22-degree morning. The stuff that keeps us warm and safe.

The stuff that gets the job done.

LL Bean Fleece

One of our favorite basic cool-weather layers. Our site mastermind Paul wears it when the weather is in the 40s up to about 55.

This family and Bean go way back, ever since one of our clan decided to go to college in Maine, and we are no less delighted with its flagship store than we were when we first visited back in the early ‘90s.

Now, we’re lucky enough to be able to swing through Freeport at least once a year for a marathon (ha!) shopping session on our way to our annual family retreat on Mount Desert Island.

LightSpur LED heel clip

Gmaps wants you to shine bright like a diamond, especially so that you don’t get hit by a car.

The handy little LightSpur clips to your heel so that your moving foot is visible. Up. Down. Up. Down. Drivers may be so mesmerized by it that they accidentally go off the road and into a ditch. Well, we hope not, but we really want them to see us. Which is why we also wear this …

Ultimate Survival Technologies Headlamp

A powerful little lamp and essential for those 5 a.m. workouts (see above; real people training before commutes etc.).

Expert runner’s hack: Wear this on your wrist!

It has a little clip that pivots to attach to the band, so instead of wearing it on your head (super annoying), clip it to your …

RoadID

Lets emergency responders know who you are. One of those great inventions that makes you wonder why no one thought of it sooner. A terrific way to soothe anxious spouses who may not be tickled about your planned solo century or 10K run down a remote road. There’s wrist models, shoe models, dog-tag models.

If you haven’t already been sucked in by the tales of horror on the RoadID website, proceed over there immediately and scan the story at the top of the page. You’ll be clicking “buy” before you know it.

Don’t leave home without one!

Some places where you DON’T need to spend a lot of money:

Headphones. We’ve tried a lot of different types, but in the end, it comes down to just a pair with a clip that goes over the ear.

Armbands. At this point, we’ll take any old band that will fit our increasingly huge phones.